What Does Barack Obama Know About Droughts and Crop Failures?

Oct 14, 2013

RUSH: This guy from LA, the LA Times, who has this piece about me: “Sure, political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have built very lucrative careers by bashing government day in and day out.

“But, in their pampered lives, they have never had to see crops wither in a drought or farmland swamped by a flood or a herd of cattle perish in a snowstorm.” A, I have seen droughts. Many of them. I grew up in the Midwest! Does Obama know anything about crop failure? What does Obama know about anything? Look at the assumption here. This guy’s headline: “Shutdown Has Proved One Thing: Government is Vital to Us All.” It has no such thing proved that, “Government is Vital to Us All.”

I don’t know that Obama knows anything about crop failure, floods, or herds of cattle perishing in a snowstorm. I just look at these assumptions these people make. “Obama, the Democrats, oh, they’re Mr. and Mrs. Sensitive! Oh, they know everything. They’re aware of everything, and because of that, they know how important government is.” I’ve lived during droughts. I’ve lived during crop failure.

I grew up in Southeast Missouri.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that you have all these people who’ve been raised to think government is everything. They can’t get by a day without government in their life! But they’re not content to hold that view themselves. We must all be that way. Every issue that liberals believe in we must also believe in, like this Redskins name. I’m not going to mention any names here, but everybody knows what I’m talking about, the football game last night.

Even though nobody cares, “You should because I do. You should because I’m a better person than you are, and it bothers me — and since it bothers me, it ought to bother you. Even though it doesn’t bother you and even though the people responsible for it don’t mean anything mean by it, it still isn’t any good because me and my buddies in the media say so — and because we say so you need to change it, and if you don’t want to change it means you’re not as good a person as I am.” That’s the way they all are, this mad presumptive superiority that they have about themselves.

It really frosts me.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, I just noticed something. This piece that I mentioned a couple times in the previous hour, the Los Angeles Times, this guy David Horsey: “Shutdown Has Proved One Thing: Government is Vital To Us All.” It turns out this guy’s a rancher. And it is in this piece that he says, “Sure, political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have built very lucrative careers by bashing government day in and day out.” Well, that’s not what we do.

But nevertheless. “But, in their pampered lives –” You know who’s pampered is Barack Obama. Barack Obama leads a pampered live. Barack Obama’s living off everybody else. Barack Obama is the guy living a life he would not have if he had to earn it and produce it for himself, not even close.

I’m not living off of anybody, including the government, purposefully by design. So it’s just another example of achievers being the problem. Achievers, people that succeed somehow are insensitive and uncaring and somehow are pampered. “But in their pampered lives, they have never had to see crops wither in a drought or farmland swamped by a flood.” I grew up on the Mississippi River. What does this guy think I haven’t seen? My family are attorneys. Their clients contain lists and lists of agricultural people who have had to deal with this kind of thing. I saw it all my life growing up. To this day it still happens, of course.

“Farmland swamped by a flood, or a herd of cattle perish in a snowstorm.” But he begins his piece here: “Ranchers in western South Dakota are busy with the grim work of gathering the carcasses of more than 75,000 cattle killed in a freak wind and snowstorm last week. They could use some help, but none is coming from a shut down federal government.” Now, I have a question for you: How many of you knew that there was a massive winter storm in South Dakota last week? I didn’t know.

Here are the details. This is a weather.com story from October the 7th. “A record-breaking storm that dumped 4 feet of snow in parts of western South Dakota left ranchers dealing with heavy losses, in some cases perhaps up to half their herds, as they assess how many of their cattle died during the unseasonably early blizzard.” So what we have here, we had a horrific winter storm that hit South Dakota a week ago, total 20 inches of snow, massive cattle losses. And, of course, that’s got a lot of consequences. They now think up to 100,000 head of cattle, 50 to 75% of the herds. The people have still not dug out of this thing. FEMA is still not there. Obama still hasn’t mentioned it.

Now, Mr. Horsey here in the LA Times assumes this is because of the shutdown. Pampered Republicans have shut down the government and therefore FEMA and Obama, oh, they would love to be in South Dakota. Oh, they would love to be helping these ranchers. Oh, yeah, they would love to be there giving money and assistance and everything they could, but those damn pampered Republicans have shut the government down. They haven’t gotten any help outside their state governments, but it isn’t because of any government shutdown. It isn’t because the Republicans are pampered, Mr. Horsey.

The reason why you and your fellow ranchers haven’t gotten any help is because Obama and the boys cannot afford for the people to find out that in the middle of their global warming catastrophe, there’s a major blizzard that was two months early. Because a major blizzard two months early doesn’t fit the bill of climate change and global warming caused by evil Republicans living their lives driving big SUVs. This thing has been totally ignored. Why are they ignoring it? Because they don’t want to blame this on global warming, because this is a red state, because it’s mostly majority white people affected? Who knows.

But it did not get any coverage whatsoever, and there hasn’t been any government outreach. And, of course, look, even this, the government can’t prevent the snowstorm. The government can’t prevent droughts or floods, and Obama doesn’t know anything about them. But even in the midst of this blizzard, with all of this damage to crops and to cattle, this guy writes a piece blaming me and others for the government shutdown when, in fact — and I know he’s not going to believe this, but the reason there isn’t any assistance up there is because the left in this country can’t admit that it happened.

Why has there not been one story on this outside of the local media? Why? Look at the damage here. If this had been New Orleans or if this had been New York or New Jersey and a hurricane, you’d have heard about it, particularly in the middle of a government shutdown because the media would have taken the occasion to blame the Republicans for this. But here you’ve got South Dakota, where there might be a little bit of an oil boom going on as well, at least in that region. Here you have a major blizzard, four feet of snow. Four feet of snow, 100,000 head of cattle gone. And not even a mention of it.

I will guarantee you, hard as some of you might find this to believe, I’ll guarantee you the reason it wasn’t mentioned is because it doesn’t go well. I mean, not one story in the so-called mainstream media, not one. This is at weather.com on October 7th, and Mr. Horsey’s writing about it here. He’s a rancher in Western South Dakota, busy with the grim work. It was a freak storm, but none is coming from Washington, no help because of the government shut down.

He ends his piece this way: “Yes, sometimes government can be like a friend who gets on our nerves or gets a little bossy or does things we don’t agree with, but, particularly in times of crisis like the disaster in South Dakota, we need that friend to be standing by our side.” Where are they, Mr. Horsey? I don’t have the power to keep them out of there. I don’t have the power, neither does Sean Hannity. We don’t have the power to keep Obama, who’s an expert on cattle and Obama’s an expert on floods. He’s an expert on blizzards. He’s an expert on everything. We don’t have the power to keep him out of there.

What has been harmed by the shutdown? Because the USDA farm services offices are closed, so ranchers can’t begin the process of applying for relief from losses? A couple days are gonna make that much of a difference? How about the USDA takes weeks, if not months to process these loss applications in the best of times. At any rate, I just had to go back because I missed, when I first perused this piece, that he himself is a rancher. I thought he was a columnist for the newspaper. It turns out he’s a rancher and he’s blaming the Republicans for the shutdown, which is the way this is supposed to go. This is an example of the media in the Democrat Party back pocket.